Racial Opression And Categorization in U.S History, 1776-1940

Lecture 3 Part 2

Restoration of Racial Oppression in the South

how was racial slavery restored?

In what ways did this keep black people in subordinate positions?

Racial Slavery was replaced by sharecropping

• sharecropping: an arrangment in which a landowner allows laborers to use their land and tools in exchange for giving the landowner a portion of the crop

  • they dont pay them in money, they pay them in share of crop their produce.

  • in the 19th century nd early 20th century, most African Americans were sharecroppers.

• Ways they were in subordinate positions:

  • debt: sharecroppers arent making any money thorughout the year to survive, therefore they had to borrow money from the landowners

  • Laws developed around this system that kept black people without power, ex: laws preventing families from moving away from the county side (into cities) because they wanted them to keep living in the rural south where they didnt have economic oppertunities.

Racial oppression outside of South in early 20th Century

context (hint: 1916- 1970 event)?

reasons this happened?

• context: 20th- century Black Migration out of Rural South (THE GREAT MIGRATION)

  • unlike the Jim Crow states, black people outside of the south could vote and hold office

  • political exclusion was geographically variable

  • in the 20th century the location of black population in America changed.

  • before 1900, 90% of black people in the US were in the South

  • in the 20th century there was a population balloon of people migrated Northward to the East, Midwest, and WestCoast

• outmigration happened because:

  • the 20th century agriculture is mechanized and landowners did not need as many workers to grow and harvest the crops

  • racial oppression that in this period was more intense in the southern states.

  • but they faced new forms of opression elsewhere.

Housing Segregation

• housing segregation was one of the main forms of racial oppression throughout the country

• creation of Ghettos: areas of cities in which a racial or ethical group is concentrated due to exclusion from other areas.

• racial covenants: legally binding agreements between white property owners restricting their ability to rent or sell to non-white people.

  • agreement between property owners to not give property to non-white people

  • the law doesn’t bind them but their signature to this agreement does legally bind them.

  • not only are these prompted by real estate agencies but the federal governments also back it up

  • when the federal government enters into the housing market they required people to sign these racial convinents

Discrimination in the labor market (job market)

• there is some distinction between the Jim Crow South and the rest of the Country

• in the jim crow south there are laws that say that labor markets need to be segregated while outside of this it does not exist

• this is why many black people begin leaving

• however there is a de-facto segregation of work place

• there were no laws that prohibited discrimination in hiring

• the push for exlcusion came from both the workers and the employers

• labor unions organized around their rights and interests but they excluded black workers

Categorization of people with both White and Black ancestry

• there were different rules in different places

• white people in some places used inbetween, mixed-race categories like “Mulatto”

  • idea that the children of white abd black people are now a third category (idea immerged in the lower south)

  • they were treated as superior to black people and given some privilages

  • the category of white people could include people with african or black ancestry. ex: in some states in the south the first 50 yrs of US history you could say youre ¼ whit and youd be white by law

• In other places, white people developed the One-drop rule: the notion that “one drop” of “black blood” means a person is fully black

  • dates back to the colonial period because slaves would mix with endentured servants and the elite class saw this mixture as a threat because it could become a bridge to connect poor black people ad white servants and then revolt

  • therefore they developed this system to ensure their offspring would be racially categorized as black

  • this denied the existence of any in between category

categorization of people with both white and black ancestry

shift to the one drop (which reading addresses this? )

what happened 1930?

what happened in 1920?

• in the early 20th century, shift to the one drop rule

• by 1930 southern states had institutionalized one drop rules or 1/8 rules

• by 1920 in between categories eliminated from census

  • 1890 census includes a lot of in between categories but they went back in 1920

  • in this period it is still based on peoples looks not self identitifcation

  • by 1920 the term is eliminated

  • this is despite the fact that the census bureau knew that the majority of the people that would be categorized as black actually had mixed ancestry

  • it is not that they didnt know its just that they wanted to count people as black from that point

shift in one drop rule (continued)

• main cause was Jim Crow System

  • the shift occurs after the jim crow laws

  • the existence of people that are categorized as mixed race poses a threat to the jim crow system.

  • this system operates through the seperation of black and white people and mullatos make that seperation difficult.

  • by the 19th century there are people who are fourth or fifth gen with mixed ancestry

  • there are people who look white but have black ancestry

  • this is a threat to the system

  • good example: plessy vs ferguson

  • not about segregation but about exclusion

  • notions that race and racial categorization is shaped by the notion of power

• A consequence: shift towards inclusive notion of Black identity within black communties

  • over time people were formally recognized as mullatos and were accepted within the black community

  • in more recent times the one drop rule has been challenged by the notion of bi-racial and multi-racial identities